Why So Many Millenials Are Living at Home

Do not, says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic:, freak out: a huge percentage of young people are not living with their parents, despite the many stories you’ve read in prestige media like the New York Times, Salon, and the like. The percentage of young people the Census says are living at home is at an all-time high, true, but only because the Census defines this to include living in dorms.

Obviously many journalists forgot to read the fine print and most readers accepted the claim because it seemed so likely to be true, given the economy and what they think is the character of twenty-somethings. But why is the percentage at an all-time high?

According to Richard Fry, the wonderful Pew demographer, the answer has less to do with “laziness” or the recession’s impact on Millennial wages and jobs. It has mostly to do with education.

As you can see in the graph below, the share of 18-to-24-year-olds living at home who aren’t in college has declined since 1986. But the share of college students living “at home” (i.e.: in dorms, often) has increased. So the Millennials-living-in-our-parents meme is almost entirely a result of higher college attendance.

The story provides a useful lesson in reporting and in reading reports. Thompson offers his view of what it means:

If we’re going to freak out about young people, let’s do so for the right reasons. Unemployment is too high, entry-level jobs are depressingly salaried, and many have taken on student loans that will negatively shape their immediate future.

There is that, but he ignores, revealingly I think, a much more significant figure that appears in the chart he’s included with his article: that since 1968 the percentage of adults 18 to 31 who are married has declined from almost 60 percent to just over 20 percent. That the number of young people forming families has shrunk from the majority of young people to about one-fifth is far more significant than the exact percentages of those who are living with their parents and those who are in university housing — those who are to some degree foot-loose and fancy-free.